A study of consumer attitudes about health care: the control, cost, and financing of health services.

The delivery of health care had emerged as one of the most important political issues of the 1970's, yet public attitudes about health issues remains a relatively unexplored subject. Little is known about the public's opinion of who should control the delivery of health care, about how the costs of health care are perceived, or about how the delivery of care should be financed. This paper relates respondent attitudes on these subjects to attitudes about criteria that determine the respondent's choice of ambulatory care facility and to socioeconomic, political, and other demographic characteristics. The data are derived from a survey (N=521) of households representative of the area of Rochester, New York.